instigator : disruptor : thinker : doer : curator : artist

Category: mind toys

Sales visulization of app store sales. Sometimes we all know that data can be quite beautiful. This is one of those moments. I would love to have a wall of these monitors for displaying information spaces.
Each time one of more than 50,000 apps is sold the icon pulses.

I’ve been a bit more focused on words lately. I attribute that to the fact that I have been designing communication architectures for the past few weeks and have not spent any time in my art studio. This changes me into a person who really depends on language much more. When I spend time making art there’s little to say until after the art is finished.

We all talk about black holes today. My homework was swallowed up by a black hole…

One particular aspect of Einstein’s theory got Dr. Wheeler’s attention. In 1939, J. Robert Oppenheimer, who would later be a leader in the Manhattan Project, and a student, Hartland Snyder, suggested that Einstein’s equations had made an apocalyptic prediction. A dead star of sufficient mass could collapse into a heap so dense that light could not even escape from it. The star would collapse forever while spacetime wrapped around it like a dark cloak. At the center, space would be infinitely curved and matter infinitely dense, an apparent absurdity known as a singularity. – from The New York Times

The black hole “teaches us that space can be crumpled like a piece of paper into an infinitesimal dot, that time can be extinguished like a blown-out flame, and that the laws of physics that we regard as ‘sacred,’ as immutable, are anything but,” he wrote in his 1999 autobiography, “Geons, Black Holes & Quantum Foam: A Life in Physics.” (Its co-author is Kenneth Ford, a former student and a retired director of the American Institute of Physics.)

This is the second TED talk that I had to put at my blog. It surprised me utterly. The possibilities of designing a new information framework for what could be called a dictionary makes my heart race. What would this dictionary look like? How would it behave? How could this framework manage exponential organic growth?

Yippie! We use legos to stimulate thinking. Build models of website architectures. And create buildings and other structures just for fun. I see Legos and I have to buy them for someone that I know. Maybe for the LEGO birthday I’ll have to buy some for me. Thanks to webchick for the photo.

Just a few facts.

Founded in 1932 by carpenter Ole Kirk Christiansen from Billund, Denmark, the company made wooden toys. The trademark name didn’t come until 1934, inspired from the Danish words “leg godt” (play well), and it wasn’t until 1949 that Lego began producing their now-famous interlocking bricks. The design finalized in 1958 and it took another five years to find proper materials to produce the blocks.

The LEGO Company is one of the world’s largest toy manufacturers. They have molded more than 200 billion plastic building pieces over the past fifty years.

The LEGO Company funds $5 million lab at MIT Media Laboratory : A lab for playing and learning.

Well now you have, check it out. It’s a great way to send images to your friends. Make sets, send sets. Make stuff. Trade them. The photograph above is one of a set we made to celebrate our trip to Montreal for Margaret’s birthday. To see photos of the birthday trip click here.

Last night was community movie night at Sherman Mills. The feature was KOYAANISQATSI.

ko.yaa.nis.katsi (from the Hopi language), n. 1. crazy life. 2. life in turmoil. 3. life disintegrating. 4. life out of balance. 5. a state of life that calls for another way of living.

Translation of the Hopi Prophecies Sung in KOYAANISQATSI
“If we dig precious things from the land, we will invite disaster.”
“Near the Day of Purification, there will be cobwebs spun back and forth in the sky.”
“A container of ashes might one day be thrown from the sky which could burn the land and boil the oceans.”

I’ve seen this film more than a dozen times. It’s just as good as the first time I saw it… maybe better. Life experience creates new narratives and juxtopositions. Koyaanisqatsi is the first film in a trilogy. The second film Powaqqatsi is focuses on natives of the third world. And Naqoyqatsi is about civilized violence.

Na-qoy-qatsi: (nah koy’ kahtsee) N. From the Hopi Language. 1. A life of killing each other 2. War as a way of life. 3. (Interpreted) Civilized violence.
-end credit definition from the feature film “Naqoyqatsi”.

“let me tell you about hard work!”
An amazing live preformance by P!nk. As an artist her work continues to ask us important questions. The juxtoposition of her Marilyn hair and dress when she sings Dear Mr President is haunting.
A true preformance artist. You may have seen her on the Today Show, or Regis, or YouTube doing her hit Stupid Girls. I’m glad to know she hails from Pennsylvania and she’s doing good.

I posted this back in april but it doesn’t seem to grow old. That is unfortunate.

I can put my brain in it at incredible speed. It is faster than a blog and smarter too. It is my own personal wiki. Now one might think that is a little strange – most wikis are for collaborative writing.

But, I look at it from this snipit point of view:

Wiki is sometimes interpreted as the backronym for “What I know is”, which describes the knowledge contribution, storage and exchange function.
– from wikipedia

it is about what i know.
I catch random thoughts, I am able to create access to the tangents that inhabit my mind. That’s what I call amazing technology. A way to express oneself in a way much more like the experience of being both the left and right of my brain.

Again Salon.com comes through for me. This is a wonderful piece that is spot on. The only brave journalist so far to see the performance and speak to it truthfully.

excerpt:

In the late 1960s, the Situationists in France called such ironic mockery “détournement,” a word that roughly translates to “abduction” or “embezzlement.” It was considered a revolutionary act, helping to channel the frustration of the Paris student riots of 1968. They co-opted and altered famous paintings, newspapers, books and documentary films, seeking subversive ideas in the found objects of popular culture. “Plagiarism is necessary,” wrote Guy Debord, the famed Situationist, referring to his strategy of mockery and semiotic inversion. “Progress demands it. Staying close to an author’s phrasing, plagiarism exploits his expressions, erases false ideas, replaces them with correct ideas.”